Advisory board

Dr Ruth Beecher (r.beecher@bbk.ac.uk) is a Senior Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She is an historian of childhood with interests in the family in twentieth-century Britain, Ireland and the US. Her most recent Wellcome-funded project Recovery Histories investigates how cultural, clinical and institutional ideas about trauma and recovery from child sexual abuse have developed since the 1950s and how a medical model of recovery has come to dominate medical, psychiatric and public discourses of healing. Beecher is also the Public History editor at Oral History and co-chair of the Challenging Research Network.

Dr Daniel Grey is Reader in Modern History and Programme Leader for BA Sociology at the University of Hertfordshire. He works on the intersections between gender, law, and medicine, in particular relating to crimes of violence such as infanticide and child abuse. Increasingly, he is also investigating 'dark heritage' in relation to these subjects.

Dr David McGinniss is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research has focussed on histories of institutionalisation in Australia, critical heritage and the role of activism in shaping social policy. He has contributed to community-based interpretation of former sites of children’s institutionalisation in Ballarat, and works with contemporary community sector organisations to critically approach their contested histories.

Dr Marianne Servaas (Chair of the Advisory Board) is a systematic theologian and senior researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain where, alongside Prof. Dr. Wim Vandewiele, she founded the Research Group for Safeguarding in the Church. Her work is deeply informed by having been the recipient of both sexual and spiritual abuse, equipping her with both emic and etic perspectives in examining patterns of systemic abuse and institutional cover-up.